This invention relates to a rafter-to-corner plate connection; most commonly occurring in wood frame buildings having a hip type roof or in wood frame gazebos.
Sheet metal connectors for joining common rafters to wood top plate members have been in use for some time. There is, however, no connector commercially available for joining hip rafters to corner plates or gazebo rafters to top plates.
The rafter-to-corner plate connectors taught by a few patents are impractical because they are either too costly to manufacture or are incapable of handling the many different rafter slope angles.
Prior art rafter-to-corner plate connections such as Snow, U.S. Pat. No. 3,925,954 require that the hip rafter be deeply miter cut or "bird-mouth" cut as in Snow U.S. Pat. No. 4,229,915 in order to lower the hip rafter so that it will lie in the same plane as the adjacent common rafters. Hip rafters due to the geometry of a roof carry the greatest load, yet such deep cutting of the hip rafter weakens the ability of the hip rafter to carry roof loads.